Fourteen students
gathered at the Florida Film Festival headquarters to adapt a pack
of commercially available toy robotic dog -- to upgrade the raison
d'etre of their robots. They equipped the toys with a new nose (environment
toxin sensor), and a new brain (microprocessor), and have mechanically
upgraded (hotroded) the dogs so they can now navigate any outdoor
terrain. The new brain changes the dogs behavior : each is now programmed
to follow concentration gradients of the material (VOCs*) they are
sensing i.e. they appear to be sniffing out a toxic trail.

Wed March
12: The Release Preparations

The students
have prepared their robots to perform on a couple of 'sites of community
interest'. Including a new residential development near the center
of Orlando: Baldwin Park, and a childrens play ground adjacent to
Lake Ivanhoe with pressure treated wood recently closed
Built atop an old Naval base the dogs will first be released on
the future site of the Baldwin Park middle school which is adjacent
to the old naval landfill. In the search for inexpensive real estate,
many schools in the US have been built on old landfill and hazardous
waste disposal sites [Hamden middle school, CT for example, and
LA school district]. There is known drycleaning fluid contamination
at the Baldwin Park development at or near the old landfill site.
The developers have reportedly covered the land fill with a further
2 ft of soil.

The feral robotic
dog pack release is intended to provide an opportunity for evidence
driven discussion of the environmental issues facing the community,
and the opportunity to coordinate diverse opinions and interpretations
of the phenomena at hand.
Because the dogs space-filling logic emulates a familiar behavior,
i.e. sniffing something out, anyone can participate
and try to make sense of this data in real time without necessarily
having the technical or scientific training usually required to
interpret data from other sources on the same phenomena. It has
the potential to raise the standards of evidence involved, promote
diverse valid interpretations involved in complex environmental
and political processes.